Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Dimensions of Right Effort… There are skillful desires and unskillful desires. The skillful desires are focused on the path for the sake of the goal. To make another analogy, it’s like driving to a mountain on the horizon. If you spend all your time looking at the mountain while you’re driving, what happens? You drive off the road. You have to focus your attention on the …
- Endurance & Contentment… And the “knowledge” here is the knowledge of a skill: knowing how to breathe, knowing how to talk to ourselves, knowing what perceptions to hold in mind. One of the most harmful mental fabrications to focus on is how you’re suffering under some condition that other people are not suffering under and thinking that it’s not right. But then again, you don …
- Mindful Judgment… And as the Buddha said, with mindfulness as your gatekeeper, you develop what’s skillful and you abandon what’s not. Which means that mindfulness has an important function in learning how to be wise in judging what’s skillful and what’s not. You bring your full presence of mind as to what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate, what needs to be …
- Training Your Moods… One is that it is a skill that you’re working on here: the skill of staying with one object with a sense of well-being, developing skillful qualities in the mind and abandoning unskillful ones. Your ability to do this well will develop over time as you commit yourself to doing it and reflect on the results, make adjustments, and then do it …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… As you notice what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind, you let go of what’s unskillful, develop what’s skillful, and that’s what gives rise to a sense of rapture, well-being. Once you’ve been energized by the rapture, then you can calm things down. And here you’re coming from a sense of well-being, a sense …
- Appreciation… It’s a skill to master and there’s a joy that comes in mastering the skill. This is why it’s good to find happiness in the happiness of others. It’s good to find happiness in the activities of others that are genuine causes of happiness, because that makes us want to create those genuine causes in ourselves as well.
- Close to What You Know… What, at the present moment, is the most skillful way to interpret your experience of reality? What can you shape, what can you not shape? When you keep things on this level, you find you can deal with reality, shape your reality, in a much more skillful and beneficial way.
- Defiant Like the Buddha… That’s the essence of the skill that he taught. So, for unskillful mind states that you can convert into something skillful, go ahead, convert them. The ones that you can’t convert, just let them go. Even if they keep coming back, coming back, you have to remind yourself that you don’t have to go. No matter how insistent they are, you …
- The World of Conviction… But to get to the point where you apply not-self to everything, you have to learn how to create a good self, a skillful sense of self and, at the same time, have a skillful sense of the world around you, a world in which awakening is possible. Now this is a matter of conviction. You’re not going to know the truth …
- Victory… Get to know this area really well, because your lack of skill in dealing with it is what causes the suffering. But that lack of skill can be turned into skill if you bring the right knowledge. When the four noble truths talk about suffering, they’re talking about this suffering, the suffering that’s caused from within. So explore this area. Like the …
- Booster Stages… It’s a slightly different skill from getting the mind into concentration. It requires a lighter touch. Less conversation. Or like when you’re sailing: It takes a while for the sails to finally catch the wind, then your work at the rudder is different from the away it was before the sails caught the wind. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, there are …
- Question & Probe… So it’s important that you learn how to protect this space you create here, because it’s so easily overrun, especially when you’re first working on this skill. When you can develop and maintain it, it becomes your safe place. The mind needs a safe place—and not only a safe place, but also a range of weapons or tools: skills that …
- Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong… We’re looking at life as a skill. And the skill is determined both by your intentions behind your actions and by the results of the actions. Say you intend to make a chair. As you’re planing the wood, the plane digs a little bit deeper than you intended it to. You’re judging a work in progress, so you figure out what …
- Sources of Lasting Happiness… qualities that help you act in skillful ways because they enable you to see what’s actually going on. They can help you see what you’re doing and see the results of what you’re doing. If you see that the results are not good, they can help you think of new ways of acting that will be better. These are the qualities …
- Samvega & Pasada… When you run up against obstacles, you sit there and watch them for a while and figure out, “Okay, what’s the obstacle here and what’s the way around it?” They’ve done psychological studies of people who are extremely skillful in different fields, and they’ve found that it starts with having a strong sense of the danger and drawbacks that can …
- Changing Your Mind… learning how to recognize an unskillful state when it comes, and then being able to remind yourself, “What do I do with this so that I don’t give in to it?” It’s the same with recognizing a skillful state: You have to remember, “What I do with this so that I can maintain it?” So this kind of change, you have to …
- Working Ourselves Free… Then there’s the effort of giving rise to skillful qualities that haven’t arisen yet, and maintaining and developing the ones that have. And these are the skillful qualities you want to focus on: your alertness, your mindfulness, your concentration, and your discernment. Underlying all this is a sense of heedfulness, that what you’re doing is really important. As soon as you …
- Inner Discontent… The next step is to figure out the next time around, “How can I improve on this? How can I learn not to make that mistake again? And how can I also encourage the set of skills that I can depend on?”—i.e., developing things that are right in the mind, that can give you the strength to keep going. This perception of …
- A Game of Chess… A very simple principle Ajaan Lee mentions is that, first, you learn how to let go of whatever’s obviously bad, obviously unskillful, and hold on tight to what’s skillful. When your skillful qualities have done their work, then you can turn around and look at them. See how those are fabricated as well. Then you let them go. It all sounds nice …
- Feeding the Mind… As you get more and more skilled staying here, learning how to work with the breath, finding what the breath can do for the body, you begin to realize that a lot of things you used to depend on emotionally outside, you don’t have to depend on anymore. It’s as if the breath is health food for the mind. We’ve been …
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